Death Wish

He had di

Later that night in the East Village he shot a man coming down a fire escape with a portable TV set.

*  *  *

It had been a slow weekend for news. Somewhere along the line the police had begun to make co

A VIGILANTE IN THE STREETS?

Three men, all with criminal records, and two teen-age boys with narcotics arrest records, have been found shot to death in four Manhattan areas within the past ten days—all five shot by bullets from the same revolver, according to the police.

Deputy Inspector Frank Ochoa, placed in charge of the case on Friday, is calling it “the vigilante case.” Inspector Ochoa said no co

From circumstantial evidence the police theorize that all five victims may have been engaged in criminal acts at the time of their deaths. Three of them, including the two 17-year-old boys (the only two of the five who were found dead at the same place and time), were found under suggestive circumstances. The two boys were found in the midst of a station wagon-load of car-stripping tools. The most recent victim, George Lambert, 22, was found with a stolen television set at the foot of a fire escape leading down from the window of an apartment from which the set had been stolen. The window showed signs of forcible entry.

The other two victims, found in upper Manhattan parks, may have been engaged in narcotics trading or armed robbery. Both were armed with knives.

These facts have led the police to the tentative conclusion that a self-styled, one-man vigilante force is stalking the city with a .32 revolver. “It has to be some guy looking for retribution,” Inspector Ochoa believes. “Some nut that thinks he’s a one-man police force.”

Inspector Ochoa has assigned a special detail to the case. “We’re begi

By the next morning the newspapers had picked it up with full energy. Inspector Ochoa was the Times’s Man-in-the-News. In the Daily News on the editorial page the Inquiring Fotographer’s man-in-the-street question was, “How do you feel about the vigilante killer?” and the six answers ranged from “You can’t take the law into your own hands” to “They ought to leave that guy alone, he’s doing what the cops should have done a long time ago.” The afternoon Post editorialized, “Murder answers no questions. The vigilante must be nailed before he murders any more victims. We urge the Manhattan D.A. and the NYPD to spare no effort to bring the psychopath to justice.”

He got up in the middle of the night. The sleeping pills weren’t working very well any more. He made a cup of tea and re-read the newspaper accounts. The cup and saucer rattled in his hand, the tea rumbled uneasily in his stomach; he heard himself whimper softly.

There was no appeasement of his distress. He was miserably lonely; he didn’t want to spend the night with a woman—he didn’t want to spend the night at all. He thought of Ochoa and his special detail: they were out there somewhere, ambitious men stalking him when they should have been guarding the honest citizens. An entire city slashing itself to extinction and all the police could do was search for the man who was trying to show them the way back.

It was a little after three. He didn’t go back to bed. He had cleaned the gun since its last firing, but he cleaned it again and sat a long time debating whether to continue carrying it in his pocket all the time. It might be safer to find a hiding place for it. As far as he knew, he had left no clues that would lead the police to him; but their technology was impressive and it was possible some hint might cause them to question him at some point. It would be better not to have the gun on him.

But there was no place to hide it. If they became suspicious of him they would surely search his apartment and his office. Other than those two places there was no other cache that would be safe and easily accessible. He thought up elaborate schemes worthy of gothic horror stories: digging out a brick in the basement, hiding the gun behind it—but all those were risky notions. A small boy might stumble on the hiding place; the building handyman might find it. The gun was the only positive and irrevocable co

Half-past four in the morning. His thoughts pendulumed from extreme to extreme. If they caught him he would kill himself, it was the clean neat way. No. If they caught him he would fight it out in the courts; he would get the best lawyers and they would have public sympathy on their side.

It wasn’t inevitable that he would be caught. They had no objective cause to suspect him, as long as he was careful. His campaign was a reasoned one, not the result of mindless compulsions; he could pick and choose his time and place, he could suspend his operations until things cooled off. He had the options of free will. The editorialists were wrong of course; he wasn’t psychotic, it wasn’t an uncontrollable obsession, he wasn’t compelled by diseased brain-cells to keep slaughtering i

“You can see it in the kids,” George Eng said. “They used to be anti-police. Not any more. My kids are pro-cop with a vengeance. Can you blame them? The junkies are looting everything. Ripping off school calculators and lab equipment, mugging the kids. My son has a friend in one of the schools up in Westchester—they had to close the school this week. Vandals. They flooded the building with fire hoses—ransacked the place, urinated on the chairs, splashed paint all over the walls. I’ll tell you something, this fellow who’s out there killing them may be doing us all a service. Do you know we’ve got sixty-eight tenant families in my building and forty-one of them keep Dobermans and German shepherds? There aren’t that many dog lovers, believe me. Not when the price of an attack dog’s gone up to damn near two thousand dollars.”

Eng’s eyes had narrowed to a fighter’s squint; his mouth became small and mean. “The kids want law and order even more than we do. The only trouble is, with the police department we’ve got, it takes the cops a month to find the police commissioner. That’s why I think it was inevitable a guy like this would come along. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion he’s probably a cop himself—fed up with revolving-door courts and the red-tape delirium and the Goddamned Supreme Court. I’d lay pretty big odds on that—he’s a cop. He knows this is the only language these criminals understand. He’s giving us a deterrent for them. It’s neutralizing a few of them and I imagine it’s scaring a lot more of them off the streets. I’d be interested to see how the crime statistics have moved since this guy started—I’ll lay a small fortune muggings are way down.”